Deadly serious
In a recent video call, Heather Cox Richardson, American historian and author of Democracy Awakening, challenged us to “do what you do best from now until November 5” to keep us from a second Trump presidency and the threat to democracy of Project 2025. I accept the challenge. What I do best is dig into the details of a topic and help people make sense of it.
Most people will not read the 900-page manifesto of Project 2025 – Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise – from The Heritage Foundation. Many articles and social media posts highlight one concern or another, but in coming weeks I will lead you through it in my posts.
The introductory note on the Project reveals their ideological moorings: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement.” (xiii)
Richardson’s in-depth analysis of this conservative movement in Democracy Awakening describes exactly what Project 2025 hopes to achieve:
"Establishment Republicans who wanted an end to government regulation of business and taxes had courted racists, sexists, and religious zealots to stay in power but had no plans actually to give in to extremist demands, which would turn off mainstream voters. Trump stripped the cover off this sleight of hand, offering to give the extremist base a hierarchical world in which they dominated women as well as their Black and Brown neighbors. Trump married Republican politics to authoritarianism. … Trump’s election to the White House signaled a sea change in American history. Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives had called for destroying the active government of the liberal consensus, and since the 1980s, Republican politicians had hacked away at it but had left much of the government intact. In 2016, the nation had finally, wittingly or not, put into office a president who would use his power to destroy it."
Richardson, Heather Cox. Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (pp. 84, 93). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
In his introduction to Mandate for Leadership, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, looks back to 1980 and declares that the “the conservative movement…had been betrayed by the Washington establishment” and that “now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today.” He includes in this “political class” all who do not support their vision of an authoritarian government, whether Democrats or Republicans.
In 1980, the Heritage Foundation produced the first version of their Mandate for Leadership when Ronald Reagan became president, and many people in that administration followed its guidance to weaken, even destroy, the national government as it had been since the 1930s (under both parties). This newest version, Roberts declares, “is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”
In a recent interview, Kevin Roberts said that “the country is in the midst of a ‘second American Revolution’ that will be bloodless ‘if the left allows it to be.’” We are no longer in the realm of “culture wars.” Some people in this movement are suggesting, even calling for, actual civil war unless they get what they want. This is deadly serious.
